Don't Let IPv4 Exhaustion Sneak Up on You

A few months ago, IANA exhausted its unallocated IPv4 address pool when it gave the last /8's to regional registries around the world. That news got a fair amount of buzz. Last month, some of the biggest sites in the world participated in World IPv6 Day to a little fanfare as well. Following those larger flows of attention have been the inevitable ebbs as people go back to "business as usual." As long as ARIN has space available (currently 4.93 /8s in aggregate), no one is losing sleep, but as that number continues decreasing, and the forced transition to incorporate IPv6 will creep closer and closer.

On July 14, I was honored to speak at IPv6 2011: The Time is Now! about how technology is speeding up IPv4 exhaustion and what the transition to IPv6 will mean for content providers. Since the session afforded me a great opportunity to share a high level overview of how I see the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition (along with how SoftLayer has prepared), it might be interesting to the folks out there in the blogosphere:

As time goes by, these kinds of discussions are going to get less theoretical and more practical. The problem with IPv4 is that the entire world is about to run out of free space. The answer IPv6 provides is an allocation pool that is not in danger of exhaustion. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 isn't as much "glamorous" as it is "necessary," and while the squeeze on IPv4 space may not affect you immediately, you need to be prepared for the inevitability that it will.